Dixons' tipping point - or the end of telephony as we know it

You know the scenario. For years, nothing much seems to be happening. There's a lot of excited muttering among geeks about a particular technology, but no evidence that would compel a sensible man in a suit to pay attention. Standard market research, for example, fails to detect any important trend. Consumers profess complete ignorance when approached by persons with clipboards. The graphs meander along, hovering just above the X-axis like the Donegal mountains seen from a distance - sometimes rising slightly, sometimes falling a little, but essentially not going anywhere.

Then suddenly one day all hell breaks loose. What looked like the silhouette of foothills has abruptly turned into the vapour trail of a rocket. The graphs - of take-up, media column inches, consumer adoption - have gone through the roof. Now the aforementioned suits are hollering from the same hymn sheet: 'What the hell is going on?'

Welcome to the phenomenon that New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell has christened 'the tipping point'. In a memorable book of the same title, he described the nonlinearity of life - the way in which a small change can suddenly trigger an avalanche. Anybody who studies the history of consumer technologies has the tipping point graph - a recumbent L - etched on his or her heart.

Take text messaging as an example. SMS was an obscure technology built into mobiles from the beginning, but was little used by the adults, who were the only ones who could afford mobile phones in the early days. But when pre-pay tariffs arrived - and teenagers were suddenly able to have cellphones - SMS took off like a rocket.

Ditto the World Wide Web, which was the preserve of an exclusive minority from its first release in 1990 until the Mosaic browser was released in the spring of 1993.

And ditto with internet telephony, aka 'voice over internet protocol', aka VoIP (pronounced 'voyp'), which has just passed its tipping point. A little over a month ago, Google launched an instant messaging service with VoIP built in. Then eBay rocked the business community by agreeing to pay up to $4.1 billion for Skype, a leading VoIP service.

And this week high street chain Dixons really put the cat among the pigeons by launching its own VoIP service, Freetalk. From last Thursday, anyone with a broadband internet connection and £79.99 to spare has been able to walk into any branch of Dixons, Currys, PC World or The Link and buy a gizmo that gives them free unlimited phone calls to UK landlines for a year. Thereafter, they will have to pay £6.99 a month for the continuation of this agreeable service.

What do you get for your money? Well, for starters the freedom to choose your own area code, regardless of where you live. Then there's free voicemail. And a fully transportable number - take your adapter with you and plug in into a broadband connection; you can then make and receive calls just as if you were at home.

And you don't have to use a PC; in fact your computer can be switched off - which is one of the things that distinguishes Freetalk from Skype and Google Talk.

None of this is entirely new. For example, Vonage has been offering a broadly similar service for a while. What's significant about the Dixons launch is that VoIP has suddenly gone mainstream - like wireless networking, it has become an ordinary consumer product. And that means that there are interesting times ahead.

For 'interesting' read disruptive. VoIP is as threatening to the telecoms firms - the dinosaurs of the communications world - as that huge asteroid was for their prehistoric predecessors. The normally sceptical Economist put it succinctly: 'It is now no longer a question of whether VoIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VoIP, in short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape.'

The oddest thing is that VoIP is an old story. Paul Baran's original 1960 blueprint for what became the internet envisaged using the network for both voice and data. Ever since phone calls were digitised - thereby converting voice signals into digital data - it has been obvious that the internet was the natural medium for carrying them. Geeks have been doing this kind of thing for aeons.

What's surprising is not that it has finally happened, but that it took so long to get here. And that it was Dixons who finally got the (tipping) point.